I can actually be the person I'm trying to be as a creator.
The fact that the data is virtually open,
that anyone can access,
that is not centralized behind the doors of, say, Google,
it means that this ecosystem of tools
has to develop without considering ownership
of the data in mind.
Meaning anything that they do to make sure
they are, there is a differentiator from them
to any other application,
has to be based on anything but the data.
Which is kind of the opposite
that has been happening for the past 20 years, right?
Facebook, Google, Instagram, what do they have?
They have data.
And they just so happens to also do a little bit
of UI work here and there, right?
That is minimally acceptable for us
to give them the data they want.
Now in Noster, that is not there.
You can't own people's data.
It doesn't work like that.
Even if you are a relay operator,
people can just move to another relay.
It doesn't really work in the way people usually think
in the traditional sense.
So in a sense, say capitalism,
we will push this apps and this clients forward
on the way we want by competing with each other
on the best features, the best UI, the best experience,
instead of what we don't want,
just isolating themselves and the data they capture
out from everybody else.
That will never happen in Noster.
Greetings and salutations, my fellow plebs.
Today, my guest is Vitor Pamplona,
the creator of the all in one Noster client for Android,
Amethyst.
We talk about Noster a lot in this episode, obviously.
So if you are already in Noster,
you are going to love it and learn a lot.
And if you haven't heard of Noster yet,
or you have heard about it,
but you still haven't got around to setting up your NPUB,
hopefully this episode will be the spark you need
to get started.
You can find links in the show notes
for some great Noster resources to help you get started.
And to follow Vitor and myself on Noster.
Before we dive in, do me a favor and subscribe
to the Bitcoin podcast, wherever you're watching
or listening.
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Without further ado, let's get into this Noster talk
with Vitor Pumplona.
Great to have you here, man.
Again, it's cool.
You feel like you really get to know people through Noster,
even though it's not like you've known people since childhood
or anything like that.
But it feels like years happen in days on Noster.
I mean, just keeping up with memes alone
is a struggle sometimes.
Yep.
And it feels like that in development as well.
We start doing things and when we realize
there are three, four other people doing something similar
and coming up with their own concepts.
And it all moves really quickly in this space.
Do you find just that Noster is unique in that regard
just because it is open?
It's like anyone can build anything.
There's obviously a lot of centralized coordination.
So like you said, you may be working on something
and you find out, oh, hey, Kiran or Will already
was working on that and they found a good solution
for her vice versa.
Yeah, so I think about in the fuck your money kind of
analogy, right, for Bitcoin, we have the same thing,
but it's like fuck your data or the rest of it
that is not money.
Developers in Noster tend to have this very clear thinking
that they can just do what they want.
And as long as they publish in the format that Noster requires,
which is this event structure,
then every other client can read it.
And as long as they follow some very basic rules,
it's gonna work, it's gonna show up in the other side
and the user of the other client will ask that to be rendered.
So it's like, I can do whatever I want
from a client standpoint, I can just create any other
type of application that I would like to have
and offer my users.
And if it becomes big enough, the same users
will start asking the same feature in other clients
or at least a version of that, at least like
an acknowledgement that that feature exists, right?
So for instance, if it's highlighted,
for instance, that has these quotes
that you can just select a phrase on the website
and you can create a quote and show that to your followers,
today I think you can only do that in highlighted itself
in that client, but it will be rendered
in many other clients, it shows up everywhere.
Why? Because highlighted started creating those events
and everybody was just like, well, since it's there,
you might as well just render it.
And then later they get in the same place,
which is this NIP repo we have where we just try
to hash out some small differences on how to do things.
And it's all about just the details there.
But the idea is already there, it's already out,
people are already using it.
And because of that, you kind of have this bottom up approach
where people can create whatever they want.
And then if it gets used, it becomes the standard
and other NOSR clients start to follow it.
It is kind of interesting that, I mean, you have,
I mean, it's basically user driven,
I don't wanna say user driven development,
but in many ways it is, it's not that the users are,
you know, mandating saying, you know,
because if you listen to every request a user makes,
like you never sleep, I don't know how much you sleep anyway,
that was one of the questions that I saw on NOSR was,
you know, ask him how much he actually sleeps.
But, you know, I found that NOSR developers
have been very, they're very aware,
like they're very tuned in to the ecosystem,
they're actively using NOSR all the time,
they're not just using their own clients,
they're using other clients,
and they're listening to the users out there
trying to figure out, okay, what are people excited about?
And like you said, okay, is this something
that enough people are using,
where the folks that are using my client
are going to see a nice benefit if I implement this,
and if I don't implement it,
they may go to another client where it is already implemented.
Is that kind of how you look at things,
like is there a critical mass that you look for of interest,
or is it also kind of like what you think,
because you are a NOSR user yourself,
you know, you're not just a developer,
but you're a user as well.
And your point is well taken,
every developer in this field
is using the application they developed almost all the time.
So it kind of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy
that the application will work,
because the owner of that application
is actually the main developer,
which is very different from any other corporate development
that I have been involved with,
for instance, that I might develop something,
but never actually used it myself.
And this is only possible because NOSR is so simple, right?
You can't, like I was even playing this game
with folks at the conference, at the Bitcoin conference,
on like how big does your team need to be in NOSR?
Because it doesn't feel like it needs to be much bigger
than one or two people working on each one
of the say the versions of the app, right?
If you have a mobile version and a web version
is a little bit different,
but just for a mobile version,
then one, two, three people max
should be able to code everything they need to code
to make that application work.
There's no need for larger teams,
especially because in this case,
they are not actually controlling the data repository,
which is usually where all the problems
that Jack talks about all the time,
all the censorship limitations are still there
with the relays.
For us clients, we just get to use that data
and they store it for us.
I always say temporarily
because we never know when they're gonna delete it,
but it's there, it's kind of managed for you.
And in most of the cases, it's just free.
So you could use that for a while
until you get enough mass as a user
to pull all that data into something you control
and then take the devices and the data and your keys
with you anywhere you want.
There is literally no way to censor you in that scene.
Yeah, that's something I've actually,
I've been a little bit lazy on is setting up my own relay
just for posterity, basically,
for being able to actually have control.
Because I know that, okay,
I'm publishing to a number of different relays.
Reading and writing to a lot of these relays,
I use multiple clients as well,
just because I like to play around with stuff.
But I've still been too lazy to set up my own relay.
So I do need to get on that
because I think you're right that, yeah,
it's one thing to have, you have your own pub
and you have your own sec, right?
And that's giving you a,
certainly a better solution for identity
that you can take elsewhere,
not like on Twitter or Facebook or TikTok.
But you're not really going all the way
unless you also have that backup
of everything that you've published on there.
Because, you know, having forbidden like all the relays
I use decide to just wipe all that data.
Oh, that's gone.
I mean, I don't have it anymore.
And that would be sad because I've so many great memes,
you know, have been posted along the way.
It would be a sad thing to lose them.
So I need to get on.
It gets very serious, right?
So for instance, we were doing some experiments
in health data inside of Nostar.
So now you have your prescriptions,
your connections with the doctor,
all the communication back and forth,
all your lab results, all your allergies,
all your medications are there.
So now if you lose something, it could become a problem,
right? Because it's not there.
You need to do it again.
Or, you know, maybe you went to a new doctor
and they don't have any other information
and they missed a few things that were supposed to be there
and not there anymore.
So in that kind of mindset,
it becomes more and more important to
establish your own relay, or at least,
buy the relay service from an entity that you trust.
And that there is some terms and conditions there,
that there is some security for you as a user
to make sure the data will be there,
no matter what happens, right?
And from there, I think that gave me a lot of
additional understanding of this, like, okay, so,
yeah, Nostar gives you control over the keys,
which is essentially an identity.
You can let people know who you are
and then whatever you assign, they know it's true,
that it's you.
But it doesn't really provide a very solid platform
for hosting that data, mostly because the relays
don't have a revenue model baked into the protocol.
They have to charge in some other way,
outside the protocol as a layer two kind of thing,
that if they are one of these relays
that won't start data forever,
then they will charge you some amount
just to do that service for you.
And that's good and bad, right?
Because unlike, say something like Ethereum
that I think we all played with at the time,
it would just, the data would just stay there
in the blockchain forever.
Like Bitcoin would stay there forever, right?
It has a cost, this scarcity is a problem.
And so it's kind of big thing, it solves,
the protocol solves that problem,
but not for everybody, not for all the applications,
not for everything we wanna do with it.
And yeah, if you have something that requires
that type of scarcity, it might make sense
to have a token or so on,
but most applications out there don't actually require it.
And in fact, it goes against the application itself
because you want people using it,
you want people generating content on whatever you do.
And if you have a blockchain limiting you,
then like there is a certain ceiling to this whole process.
So you know, pros and cons of Noster,
but I do think like as we navigate this idea
of having a personal relay,
we'll get closer and closer to reality.
It will be something similar to say,
you know, buy an Apple white cloud
or Google Drive kind of thing,
that you just keep your photos there forever.
Yeah, and I think the nice thing is that there are at least
already some options for doing that in a, you know,
quote, more sovereign way.
Like I believe sovereignty is a spectrum.
Like I don't think much like Bitcoins issued supply
will asymptotically approach 21 million.
Like it'll never quite get there.
I think that's the same with sovereignty
because you can say, okay, I have, you know,
let's I run my own Bitcoin node, you know,
I use, you know, open source solutions.
I've personally verified all of the code, like all these things,
but still it's like, well, did you build your smartphone?
Did you build your computer?
Did you, you know, did you source all the parts, you know,
like, like-
Will it explode or not?
Right, exactly.
We don't know these days.
Well, and so that's the thing it's like,
and then it's like, okay,
well you're sovereign in that part of your life,
but okay, do you grow all of your own food?
Do you mill all of your own lumber?
You know, it's the, it's the eye pencil thing.
Like there's so much complexity that goes even
into the simplest things like a pencil
that it's almost impossible for one person to actually
do that in all parts of their life.
It is impossible.
I mean, like you, you can try, but again,
so sovereignty is that spectrum.
And I think the more tools that are available
to help people make those sovereign jumps
to move along that spectrum more easily,
the more people are going to use it.
Because a lot of times it is a convenience factor, right?
We trade off a little bit of privacy
or we trade off a little bit of security, sovereignty.
We trade it for convenience.
And you know, that's why-
And frankly, it may be a requirement for life.
You know, because we trust our families
with lots of things, right?
Lots of emotional content there.
I don't think you can say that you can get rid of those.
You know, you kind of want that relationship.
You want that facility around you.
And with software and systems is kind of the same.
You want to be able to choose somebody to trust
to solve a problem that you don't care
as much as something else
that you might spend a lot of time, you know,
investigating and verifying yourself.
And it's kind of like that.
There are multiple layers to this
because for instance, if you just use
an open source Nostra client,
somebody's looking at that code,
you can probably trust that that code
is doing what's supposed to do.
Certainly from client's perspective,
we try to be transparent as transparent as possible
on that one.
But regardless, it is there.
It's different than a post source Nostra client,
for instance, where that manufacturer can then say
that things have been validated, but haven't.
You know what I mean?
They can't create posts
where they can convince the user that that post
is coming from another friend of theirs
that they are following,
even though there's no signature attached to it.
Because you're not seeing the code,
just believing that they're doing
what's supposed to be doing.
Yeah, you know, I have so many things
I want to get into with you today.
Before I get too deep into these,
I do want to just start us off a little bit
with just kind of your background a little bit.
And I always like to ask this
in the form of a simple question.
Take it any way you want, long version or short version,
however you'd like to do it, but just who are you?
How did you get here today to be right now,
building the Nostra client for Android,
at least the most prominent one?
I think some others have sprung up,
but yours has certainly been the most well known
and most used, most downloaded.
How did you get here?
So I'm a computer scientist by background.
Did all my training back in Brazil.
Did an internship inside the MIT Media Lab
where I got a few new ideas there.
One of them was the early technology
behind a medical device company
that I spun off from that laboratory.
So I spent about like the last 15 years or so
leading as CEO and CTO of that medical device company
that came from my PhD at MIT.
That learning process of working with investors
and trying to figure out what is actually worth building
and what's not.
Like I was doing with vision care.
We were doing a device that you can test your eyes
for glasses to get those glasses numbers,
the six numbers that you get on a VR device.
So very unique, very different, very ahead of its time.
We developed technology, we shipped it out to the market.
I say we survived for 15 years as a small company
from our own revenues and so on.
And then it hit me like, yeah, this is good,
but like the market's so small,
we're gonna stay like this kind of forever.
So I had the decision to make.
Do I wanna do something bigger
or do you wanna stick around with just this smaller company
that provides tools for doctors
but they're doing something interesting with them
but it's not really, how do I say, game changing.
So during the pandemic, I joined Path Check
which was this new foundation, Adam I.G. again,
to deal with the pandemic somehow.
We, it was like February 2020,
we already knew pandemic was coming.
Like this was a certain fact for us.
I already knew that the company I was working for,
if the pandemic arrived, would be dead
in like in the first weeks
because my customer base was mostly based
on small business and mom and pop shops in the US,
which as we know, they got destroyed on this.
So we knew that this thing would come
and we needed solutions, right?
Nobody know anything about COVID.
We needed solutions, solutions and solutions
give me something that might work.
So we came up with one of the early versions
of the exposure notification systems
that Apple later on end up using Apple and Google.
And then later on the vaccine keyword codes,
which funny enough, the keyword code itself
is an hosted event essentially.
It is a payload that is signed by a public key
and you can verify on itself.
It's like an hosted event without the relay.
Like the keyword code is the relay essentially.
So users who transmit this left and right
without completely offline, right?
Without having any connection to a relay
and just show their health data.
And then it just so happens that government use this,
which I think is a cool idea to transfer health information
from person to person and brought the hammer on
and just said, now everybody have to use this.
And by the way, we are using this to limit
your access to places.
And I'm like, that's not what it was supposed to do.
But then it also hit me.
They could do the same thing with Bitcoin.
If they want to just trace all of our transactions,
well, okay, now you all have to use Bitcoin.
Every transaction is on chain.
And we know how to follow every single one of you.
We can't block it, but we can survey you, right?
So I was like, okay, so.
Technology is in a place right now
where we can develop everything that we think
it could be in terms of sovereignty and verification
and making sure this thing is trustless
as to the best of our knowledge.
In the end, there's always a government
that can say, you know what,
let's use the thing that they did,
that they think is good.
And then to start like, turn that thing into something evil
that just you use to track people
and do everything we want with it.
So with no service, kind of like this phase in my head
where we went from like, yeah, let's do the centralized
you know, medical device thing that everybody's
in the regular world happy with
and to a place where, well, let's just decentralize
everything and then discovering that even if you do
decentralize everything, there's still a risk
that government can take over the thing you did.
And with no service, it became something
that is way more difficult to do
just because of this idea of the relays
being so decentralized and so away from each other.
You know, yeah, they can still require,
they can do a system where, you know what,
if they see that Nostra is successful,
they can say, now you need a Nostra event
that is signed by somebody else
that has your keys in there in order to access,
I don't know, the Red Sox game.
And they can create those rules even with Nostra today.
But because we have so many relays out there,
it's a little less difficult for them to track.
Right, what's going on?
And end up, and this whole story ends up
with me developing the new DM spec for Nostra,
which is, you know, I don't know if you remember,
but Nipple 4, the previous one,
essentially displays the metadata
so you can see who is talking to who on any relay.
And the one we designed, it just displays
that you are receiving things from people.
And things doesn't necessarily mean the DM,
the time that you're receiving doesn't really match
with the time they are sending.
So it's way harder to just track things down.
Yeah, they can still try,
but it's not as easy as it was before.
Anyway, long story to say that you can, you know,
life is all about those decisions where we take
and we build products and then we realize,
hmm, this thing could have been better.
And at this point, at least I do think
the place Nostra is right now is one of these,
it's better than any other technology stack
that I have seen out there.
I mean, I love hearing that as a non-developer
because it's like, oh, good.
I'm using the right protocol as a non-technical person.
So I'm curious, what was the impetus though
behind you deciding to build Amethyst?
Like when did you make that decision?
What was the spur where you said,
oh, I'm gonna build an Android client?
So this was like December 2022.
I had just purchased an iPhone
just to use demos, the only client
that was working at the time.
All the web clients weren't really good,
but after I bought it, I was like,
what am I even doing?
Because I am an Android developer.
I can do this, I can just build one, right?
And it took me like six or seven days
to get in the mindset of, yeah, I'm actually building this.
I was on vacations in Brazil, I was just like,
okay, let me start this.
And it took me like five days to build
the entire Twitter client as we see today.
And then another five days to just
solve some of the bugs and ship it.
And then from that moment forward,
it became very clear to me that one,
that application was missing in the market
and people were kind of crying for it.
And I just kept going with it.
So it's really like one of those ideas where,
I don't know if you have been through this,
but in product development,
you kind of test many things all the time.
And I love doing little tests everywhere.
And most of the time, like 99% of the time,
nothing happens.
People kind of hate the product or,
yeah, it works, but it's not really the thing I need.
It's like not there.
And if Amazon was just like, we did this, it worked.
People use it.
We got, I don't know, 200,000 users in the first months.
And I'm like, okay, there's something here
and we need to just expand it to the extreme
we can take it, right?
And that was the moment where Nostar was just starting.
There were just a few nips and it was mostly based
on social networks like Twitter style interfaces.
It didn't do anything else, Nostar in general,
even though there were other stuff in the name.
I was like, well, I'm gonna start just pulling everything in.
Pulling everything I can.
And because we had so many users,
we were just like giving users our way to this new ideas
and new clients.
So there was, you know, the very common one
was this community client, a Reddit-like clients
that we just help kickstart them into this,
into the existence by adding into Amethyst
but not allowing them or our users to create communities.
Not allowing because, you know, we just didn't have time for
but the way we were doing it is essentially saying,
you know what, there is this other client,
you can create that and you can see things on Amethyst
and everybody that wants to join your community
can do everything through Amethyst.
So that you get your users that you want,
meanwhile, you can start enhancing your own product.
And just like that, we started doing
with every single idea we could come up with
and just enabling new clients, new structures,
new systems out there.
Obviously, it's not that everything would work
but because most of them were very new and exciting,
I think many of them are still out there
trying to make their idea work
and we still support them.
So that's kind of the path for Amethyst,
like that's why it became this, you know,
all in one kind of app that kind of tries to do everything
in a Twitter client, in a Twitter interface
but not really replacing the specialty clients
that those other use cases would usually have more abilities
and more interesting structures for.
Now I love it because I joined the Amethyst beta
because I, for one reason or another,
I have a lot of Android devices.
My daily driver is my iPhone but I have,
well, I've got a few Android devices on my desk.
So I had downloaded Amethyst on the beta right away
just because I was like, this is cool.
And I remember using it from the start
and of course it's a Noster client,
a Twitter clone Noster client,
so it had some of the same feels
but from the start, you guys did try
to do some different things
and now I hadn't used it in a little while,
I must be honest because honestly,
I had lost one of my Androids that I like the most.
I found it again and I was just playing around
with Amethyst again and it is very nice
when you go in there and you see,
first of all, you've got your main kind of short form feed
which includes everything else as well
but then what I really liked is the videos tab
that you guys have.
Like I think that that's a really, really nice feature
because you see that TikTok figured something out
very powerful, like they so powerful to the point
where Instagram copied them with Reels,
Twitter has copied it now with just,
if you go into any video in Twitter or X, excuse me
and you keep scroll, you can just, you can scroll forever
and people like that, like,
and on those centralized platforms,
you're also being fed stuff algorithmically
that is meant to enrage you and bait you and keep you there
but at least on Noster,
you're getting stuff that is just served up.
Like it's, I don't know if you have any algorithm
working in the background for that yet.
I know there's a lot of algorithms or something
I wanna talk with you about a little later
but I think that's really nice providing people with again,
those experiences that are familiar
but you're doing it in a Noster way
and I think that's really powerful
and I'm kind of curious if there are,
if you have other, let's say hidden features within Amethyst
that maybe people aren't aware of
that are a little bit trickier to get to
or that, you know, things that you've kind of snuck in there
but haven't made super public.
Is there anything like that in there
or do you try to make everything pretty, you know
to the forefront, pretty evident?
So everything has a reference on the screen.
The only things that are missing are about
setting up translations and other things
that are fairly complicated.
We just haven't developed the screens yet
but you can see that just today for instance,
several users discovered that you can edit posts
on Amethyst and it was there since the beginning
just click the three button setting thing on the post
and one of the items is just edit.
If it's your post, you can just edit
which essentially creates a new event
and replicates the older one there.
But again, that, you know, it's one of the things that
I think it helps a lot.
The app doesn't try to teach everything at once
in the beginning and just kind of overflow you
with information.
Like we don't even talk about insects
when you create an account.
You hit the button create, put a name
and that's it, you're inside the app.
Like there's no other information
that doesn't say what no such is.
There's nothing there.
As you navigate the process of working
and trying to use the app, usually with a friend
because these days everything is through
worth of mouth anyway.
You start to discover these features
and start to discover that you can change your reactions.
The emojis that you can react posts with
or that you can set up different amounts for this app
and then you discover that there is a single clicks app
button through Noster Wallet Connect.
But I mean, just to get them to be in that mindset
to have a single click, they need to know what a zap is.
They need to know what a lightning transaction is.
They need to know what the things are,
how custodial they are and so on.
Because we don't have a wallet inside the emetist itself,
they must have a companion app that serves as a wallet.
And then the Noster Wallet Connect just connects to it.
It just pays through that wallet.
And the same way it receives it.
So I do think we are really proud of that idea
of just slowly progressing the user into this space
because we have been, at least we have seen in Bitcoin
where things flow too fast for the user
and they just give up.
It's just like it's just too much,
like yeah sure, there's all this hard money problem,
like I really just wanna pay my friend here.
Like, I don't wanna know all this thing.
So when they are ready, we take that extra step.
And that usually happens, which is funny
because it usually happens in the social layer.
Meaning there is nothing in the app
to kinda train you to do the app itself.
They start asking in Noster on a chat or in their videos.
And then somebody else will reply,
is yeah you have this button that does this
and you can put this other thing.
So it uses the social network for its own training
instead of developing the training materials.
Like if I was in my company back in the day,
I would just create three or four pages of documentation
that you would read when you get the device
and you just have to follow it strictly to the letter.
Otherwise you're gonna get wrong results.
And if you get wrong results, then we are not liable, right?
But this is open source, wrong results are just fine.
So you can actually explore this new idea,
I'm not sure if it's new, but this idea of using the network,
using the power of the social layer
in the favor of the app.
But in order to do so,
you need to have these kinda hidden features
that people can talk about.
They can feel proud of themselves for even knowing about it
because it's not in the manual, it's not in the screen,
it's not in a visual effect in the app.
And that's kinda, I think,
how the conversation gets started these days.
Like there is, I receive at least, I don't know,
50 to 100 Emmatys related posts
where people just are trying to teach each other
on how to do certain things.
And I just love it, I just go there
and I start zapping people
because that's what I kinda wanna see happening
more organically than like through a process where,
you know, say I or the team behind Emmatys
teaches them what to do, how to feel, when to use it.
You know, it's like, those things are not required
if society is already there with them to help them out.
The great thing about open source solutions
built on Bitcoin and Noster
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You can verify for yourself.
And speaking of open source companies
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So thank you.
I think that's a really interesting approach.
It's kind of a, almost a choose your own adventure
type of thing.
How do you want to use this client?
And, because I'm always very fascinated by onboarding
and the different thought process
that go in there for different clients.
Like I try to just,
sometimes I'll create just a burner account,
just to try out a new client again.
If I haven't done it in a while,
I haven't done their onboarding in a while.
And I'll do that just to see, okay,
what's the same from what I remember,
what's different, how are people doing this?
Are they, is there a couple of screens
that you paged through first
that you're reading this or that?
Is it self-evident from the UI?
What kind of where you should flow, what you should do?
And so I think that that's really interesting
and the point that you mentioned just about
kind of encouraging that,
first of all, encouraging discovery of the application
through social interaction with the protocol itself
is really fascinating.
Because you're basically saying, okay,
you know, if you want to use this, like ask people,
ask a question.
And that's the beautiful thing about Noster.
And I don't think it's necessarily just a function
of a smaller scale.
I think this is something that will continue
even once Noster scales up.
Because I think people like to help others
with things they themselves are excited about.
And when you're excited about something,
you want to show somebody else, oh, you know,
here's a mistake I made here,
make sure you don't do this, you know, little things.
So, you know, I think that's great.
And I'm kind of curious as well, you know,
you mentioned that obviously you're trying to pull in
a lot of different functionality and features
into HMFIST and really be not a, let's say,
a marketplace for these different features,
but to have one home for them
and maybe you have some limited capabilities with them,
but at least you can have access to those features.
Are there features that either you are personally
would like to develop or that you are seeing
other people starting to work on
that you're particularly excited about?
Things that you think are like, wow, this is a,
this is something that's really gonna, you know,
get users excited?
Yeah, for sure.
Although I'm not sure how many users will be excited
about the ideas I have, because it's as a dev,
I can tell you what I think usually doesn't matter.
And it's like, it's, I can see what the users are doing
and then react to it and those things work better
than devs trying to come up with things to do.
So, for instance, one of the cool ideas, right?
One of the cool ideas that have been,
we have been talking about between the devs
is this notion of verifiable computation.
So now we have verifiable data.
In Nostra, you can verify any data people send to you
and you can say this is, this came from the right person.
Nobody changed the data in the middle of the way.
The next step is something that's called
like a verifiable script.
So you have a piece of code that is signed
by the author of that code that can run, right?
On itself, like a smart contract, but in Nostra.
And this is already there.
I think Will has a few new ideas in there
and there are three or four versions of it out there.
But it's essentially a script.
Once you have data and you have script,
you need something to run the script with the data, right?
But because usually you, like if the script is too long,
it's too complicated to run,
it will not be run on the phone.
So you have to believe that somebody else
that is running this code is actually doing
what's supposed to do, what the code told them to do.
Because there's no way to check, right?
If it's doing correctly or not.
Until these days, where we had the discussion
with the zero knowledge proof folks,
which are usually around Ethereum
or the crypto shit coin space,
because they don't have anywhere else to go, basically,
because they found that that's the thing
that they need to do to sustain their business.
And I'm like, well, but that's,
now we have Nostra, there's something different there.
And what they can do, both ZK Snarks and Starks,
which are the two main categories of tools
that can do this, they can say, you know what?
You had a piece of code that looked like this
and you have data that looked like that.
I run the code for you and the result is here.
And by the way, here is the proof
that I run the code without changing it.
So I can externalize this processing to anything else.
Say if you want, I don't know,
you're the top tweets of the day,
but you want to do that in such a way
that you don't trust any machine out there
that is processing for this data for you.
You can send the data, you can send the script
and just say process it for me.
And when they return, you will know verifiably true
from cryptography.
So it's truly a verification process
that they have not changed the algorithm
you told them to run into.
That there's no additional answers,
there is no ads because they might have put their own things,
their own spins on the data.
And you can check this.
And once you have these three components in place,
now you can do a lot of different things
because now phones are not bound by their computation anymore.
You can do this with AI systems that you don't trust.
You can do this without exposing.
So if you have the data in one custodial system
and another and the scripts into another custodial system,
like one relay has the data, one relay has the script,
the person running the two that needs the data
and the script doesn't need to know what the data is
and what the script is.
You just send the hashes,
the things that represent the two together.
You send them to the runner and the runner will run
and give you a proof that it did run that
without knowing what was the input
or the data that you had in there,
without knowing what the script is doing.
You just know some equations.
It's like on the AI system, you have this weights
and you don't really know what it does
until you actually run several times
and figure out what's actually doing.
So you could add all those things into Nostra
without having the scarcity of a blockchain.
And I think that idea is now coming back
into some good hands because it was basically taken over
by the shit coin stuff.
And now that we have some way of doing that
without requiring the blockchain,
I think they can come back and they can have
a really interesting or just different dynamics
on what we can and cannot do in Nostra.
Because in the end, yeah, we can do a lot on the phone,
but if we are doing AI systems,
we're gonna need massive numbers of computers out there
executing things for users.
And ZK Proofs and Snarks and Starks and so on
is just one of the ways to try to get there.
And I'm sure we're gonna get there
is just about figuring out the details on this,
if it's actually private, if it's not,
if it's secure, if it's not, and so on.
In this case, would the model basically,
because obviously there needs to be an incentive
for whoever is actually doing the computation,
is this something that you would just pay for essentially
by the user would pay for by zapping?
Like to basically initiate this request,
you would just zap along with whatever you want computed,
and then that's paying them for the computational power
that they're expending and you get back your proof.
Is that the general idea?
That's right, yes.
So we do have that model today as people might know
as DVMs, Data Vending Machines,
which is one of the nips for Nostra,
that you can just ask a computer to run something for you.
And that something might be, generate an image,
might be pick up a few posts that I would like to see
based on my preferences and so on.
But in all those instances today,
you have to trust the DVM,
you have to trust the runner is doing what's supposed
to be doing and not fooling you around.
Because obviously if they are providing content to you,
they can have a side partnership with one of the brands
and just put their products first,
or if they are just, it's the same with relays
for instance, relays could do this interesting game where
if you have a partnership with a brand
and a Nostra client calls in for,
give me all the reactions to a post that talks about,
I don't know, the MacBook Pro.
They really can say, you know what?
There are millions of these posts out there.
Here are all the positive stuff and wait a few minutes
and then say here are the negative things.
So if you start reading and you're like, yeah,
this is all positive, this is all good,
let me buy this and so on,
you miss all the negative things
just because of the time they relay added
to send them to you.
And if you don't trust that relay,
then those things can actually happen.
If they want to, they can make the side partnerships
and kind of filter out based on that partnership,
which is not really filtering,
it's just like delaying some content.
So they're still sending you things,
but because you are not patient enough
to wait for everything,
it's just like you're already making a conclusion
in the first five seconds
and then everything else doesn't really matter.
We know that that's true for many things.
So they can just play that game
and have a few different partners
and they can probably sustain themselves
without charging any user for their services.
And this is why it's so important to,
when you're in Nostra to trust the relay that you are using,
it's a trusted relationship
because the relay can warp the way you think about things
by just tweaking the timing of the post.
It is quite interesting.
It's good that there are options for relays as well.
If you find that one has lost your trust,
you can certainly find another
and they're both paid in free options, obviously.
I'm curious, this is a slight gear shift,
but something that I've just been thinking a lot about myself
in terms of adoption of Nostra
because I think everybody who's using Nostra right now
is really loves using it.
Like it's truly a fun experience,
both because there are so many options for you to use
in terms of clients,
but also because this is a novel protocol
and the people that are on here are early adopters,
they're very enthused,
they're excited.
It's a new space for conversation,
for engagement, for establishing connections.
And I mean, already,
unconferences being spun up around it,
which is just beautiful.
But in terms of broader adoption,
we're obviously still extremely early, very early.
And I'm curious if you,
where you sort of see next waves of adoption coming from?
Because I think there are kind of a couple ways
to look at this.
One is adoption is going to be a force of people
running away from something.
They're gonna be running away from authoritarian regimes,
cracking down on centralized social media platforms
or censoring them, whatever it may be.
So running away from something very negative
and finding Nostra.
And we do see these little bumps kind of in user growth
around various deep platforming censorship events
in various countries, things like that.
There's also the other avenue,
which I think is running towards something.
So it's where people don't necessarily,
they're happy with where they are.
Maybe they're a little dissatisfied with YouTube
or X or Instagram, whatever it may be.
But they find something in Nostra
that makes them want to run toward that.
That gets them excited to say,
this is something I should be paying attention to.
And I think in a lot of the first case,
so running away from something,
you're going to attract a lot more,
let's say dissidents, free speech advocates,
various activists, things like that, which is fantastic.
And Nostra exists as a tool for that.
In the latter case, where we're running towards something,
I think we're dealing with more of a content creator
type of, or just content consumer,
but content creators, I think,
bring content consumers with them.
People want to go where the content is being created,
where the content is being created,
where they like the content.
And so I'm curious if you see,
one is a push, one is a pull,
where you see kind of those next waves of adoption
coming from in Nostra.
And then on top of that,
what can clients do or what are you thinking about
in terms of kind of making those,
whatever direction you're running away from something,
you're running toward Nostra,
making it more enticing for folks to come in
and more accessible to them.
Yes, the only way to win in this space is to be better.
Not in the sense that,
better in the sense of privacy and decentralization
and all these side things we love to talk about,
but for a regular user, it doesn't really matter.
We need to be better in terms of having better content
and better apps.
Those are the only two things that matter.
Yeah, the interesting,
and the reason why we're all here is,
well, we are better,
and it just so happens that we are private,
centralized and self-custodial.
So we kind of have this really good drive for ourselves
to make things better,
but in the end for the average user,
for the average creator out there,
it is about apps that work,
in case of creators,
apps that help them make money
because that's their main living condition
that they need to have.
There's no other option.
People are on YouTube,
not because YouTube has users,
even though that is one of the cases,
but it is because it brings them cash, almost immediately.
Even if you're a smaller creator,
you get something out of it,
and you can get that feeling
that maybe it is possible to survive on this.
We have to create the same system of incentives in Nostar.
I don't think we have that flashed out yet,
but if there's one thing I know is that,
from a creator perspective,
creators are usually happy to spend money
as long as the money they spend on, say, creator apps,
does not surpass what they receive from the network.
So there is a limit to all of this,
but if you have good apps,
if you have good ideas that could serve creators out there,
just facilitate typing for regular short posts,
or just make super awesome videos
that short term form that people can use,
and posts immediately to Nostar in certain events,
certain apps, and shows up everywhere, kind of thing.
Those applications, I do believe it can be paid,
there will be business for them,
because they are needed by creators.
I don't think you can be a creator
without affording that type of equipment for yourself.
At least not a good one.
You can always start,
but even with just short posts, you can only go so far.
At some point, you start having to manage your short posts
and your real content.
If you're making money on short posts,
you need to have apps that help you understand
why certain posts worked, why they didn't work,
what types of replies, which got more, say, reactions,
or there's got more apps, and why is there a difference?
So all those things are systems
that we still need to develop for creators.
For the readers, for the users, it's all about having fun.
No one is here to debate, I don't know,
politics or the stuff that we see on Twitter
that is super negative, generally,
they're not gonna stay around for that.
But if this thing starts to become a little bit of fun,
and they can demonstrate some of the,
that's why the me movement is so important,
because it touches that component of,
let's make this fun, let's have a group of friends
that can have a chat and no one will bother them,
let's have some folks that will have public posts
that are talking about things that they care about,
I don't know, a championship of soccer, for instance,
or whatever they wanna talk about,
and it just doesn't need to have that negativity
that Twitter has.
I think Twitter can survive with that negativity
because of the ad platform they have behind of it.
If they didn't have those ads,
that everybody had just to pay for it,
imagine having to pay for something that,
as soon as you post that five or six people
just complaining about what you did.
It's just not fun, right?
So that is the type of client for readers,
for viewers, for the usual consumers out there
that we need to develop.
And even though I am one of the clients
that tries to do it all,
I think the only way to get really good at this
is to have multiple specialty clients
on each one of the media that people want to consume.
Like, yeah, Emmatis has this TikTok-like video reels thing
that you can do,
but an app that only does that can be so much better.
We know that, like I know that as a developer
that if I could focus just in one little feature
that feature could be so exciting for users.
And I can just reinforce that the learning
and the fun into that ecosystem as much as I can.
So apps like Emmatis, I think, moving forward,
they will sustain the core social network capabilities
of Nuster, but at some point,
we're gonna see this specialty apps
kind of surpassing the group of apps
because separately, each one of them will become better
than any app can ever be together, combined in one.
And frankly, I'm here for it.
Like, if that means that Emmatis will die in 10 years,
so be it.
If we have those better apps out there
and they can do a better job than I do,
let's go for it because the things we care about,
the South Custodial, decentralized and privacy,
if we can do all of that while hitting these three items,
we're done.
Like, this is great.
I don't need to do anything else.
I can retire, I can just, you know,
go spend my time at the beach
and like just use the tools everybody else is building,
both free and paid and whatever they wanna do this.
So I think that's fascinating
because it's not something you would hear
from a centralized platform developer, typically.
So you're of the opinion basically
that in the kind of micro app versus super app,
micro app ultimately wins in terms of user experience
just because that's all it's focusing on
is whatever that specific user experience is
and it's doing that better than any super app can.
I'm wondering if there is the potential for super apps,
like, you know, Amethyst I think could be considered
something of a super app
because it does a lot of these things
to still leverage some of it,
like if because all this stuff's being built out
in the open, right, for the most part,
it's being built open source.
I mean, is that something that where,
okay, a super app can actually become as good
even at these niche micro app parts,
it can be as good as the micro app
because you've been able to see, okay, I read their code,
I did a little copy pasta,
I changed some things to make it work for me.
Is that somewhat of a possibility
or do you think it's still just that narrow focus
is also something that the user perhaps wants?
Like people go to TikTok for example,
because they wanna scroll through videos.
They don't go there because they also wanna see
short form, you know, text posts, right?
So is that part of just the user psychology
more than like, yeah, we could do it,
but the user just might not want that.
Yeah, and frankly, you can see that in regular applications.
Instagram for instance, when they added the stories thing,
there was some form of user backlash
because people just wanted the pictures, right?
The stories is a separate client.
This doesn't work together.
It's like, what?
And then Snap came over and just did that component
with the disappearing videos kind of feature
and also became a big thing
just because it could do that so well.
So and from a dev's perspective,
I can tell you that every time we try to blend
this use cases into one, two things happen.
Your app becomes an operating system.
It becomes this massive things
as if you had many apps inside of it, you know?
And then now you have to manage all this thing.
And that's the problem.
That's when usually developers drop the ball here and there
because you can't manage everything.
At the same time, we already have operating systems.
You know, the Android app is there.
You can just develop an app.
So to give you more of a detail,
the caching system for short form
and the caching system for long form
and video feeds is different.
They don't share the same thing.
So the backbones of the app need to be rebuilt
to enable these additional features.
And you know, if you do a few of them is not a big problem,
but once you start adding everything like we're trying to do,
I'm seeing all kinds of problems now
because yeah, the nips are kind of managed together
in the repo and we have, you know,
a working group per se that can, you know,
kinda use the same things here and there,
but not always.
And when that not always happens,
it means that somebody needs to recall something
and then maintain it over time.
So to me, it does make sense that a specialty app
will always win over a super app in the long run
because there is more if that specialty app
can actually develop the features
that are related to that specific use case, right?
Because what happens is that,
and you can see this almost every day at NOSR,
they start into as a specialty app
and then instead of making the specialty better,
they grow like Hematys does,
like by adding other nips.
And I'm like, well, that then you are now competing with me.
I can take it, there's not a problem,
but I don't think you're gonna win for just doing that.
You have to, you had to make that use case,
you try to excel on even better and more convincing
and more, you know, more fun,
whatever the emotional appeal
that you are trying to get from it is.
And you see this everywhere,
you see this with multiple platforms.
Like I'm doing an app for Android.
I don't touch desktop, I'm not touching iOS.
Everybody asks for it, as a dev, I would love to do it
because it's something exciting
to have multi-platform things going on,
but for users, it doesn't matter.
My user base is Android.
You know, whoever is using Android today,
will not just buy an iOS tomorrow.
In the vice versa, right?
Whoever uses an iOS today will not buy
an Android device today or tomorrow.
So you have your user base
and you can specialize in what that ecosystem gives them,
right?
So I have to communicate with, I don't know,
the Galaxy Watch and not the Apple Watch.
And those are two different interfaces.
If you make one app that goes in both ecosystems,
you have to make it work for both, right?
If you push notifications, for instance,
there's already a mass between iOS and Android.
Desktops don't have push notifications.
So it's like, how do we even do the same code
for all of them?
So you can see when devs start to embrace
more than what's needed,
they start creating these issues for themselves
that just they become mediocre in all of the spectrum
of things they're trying to be,
instead of really, really good in just one specialty
that they could be.
And I do think that this is somewhat of the things
we are experiencing with Amethyst now.
The amount of features we have is so big
that we are dropping the ball in some of the nips
because we can't just keep maintaining them.
Hopefully we can solve this with more developers
and so on, but that's also what I'm trying to tell you
is that I think in the long run,
specialty apps and by specialty I mean,
this is a use case in one of the platforms.
Like this is a use case, like a video feed for Android.
This is a desktop chat application.
This is an iOS, Twitter like client.
If you specialize on those
and you do the best you can to increase the engagement
of your users and what they can take out of Noster
as a benefit for themselves, for their lives,
for their, it can be fun, it can be instructive,
it can be so many things,
but you have to get that going.
Otherwise, you're just gonna be a browser
and browsers can be replaced, right?
Browsers just, it's just the same thing.
You just shift one from one to A to B
and you get the same page in the end.
So to me it's all about like those specialty apps
that if I can help build, I will help build,
like we have been doing before,
just providing as many users
because we slightly integrate things
without fully replacing them.
That is to me the end goal.
It's like if I can just get this Noster ecosystem
without people giving up on it,
so it can keep it growing slowly over time
and let the specialty apps kind of bring new people
and bring more diversity to the set of apps we have today,
that can be a winning proposition for Noster, I believe.
I love that mentality and it is kind of interesting.
I think the idea of the Super App is very much a,
has sprung from the centralized platforms, right?
Like that's, I mean, you look at something like WeChat, right?
Like the ultimate Super App,
I think we would probably all agree on that,
at least at this time,
X seems to be trying to become
a more American version of WeChat, but okay.
But that Super App mentality comes from the idea that,
well, because, like, well, WeChat's a different story.
There's other reasons for them to want to have everybody
in one place, but let's take that aside.
Look at X, look at, look at,
I mean, Instagram's a great example, you know,
because they have now, they've spun off threads
on the top of it, which then also, you know,
has photos and videos and everything else.
So it's like, okay, it's just a,
just a different way to look at that feed.
But Instagram itself, they, you know,
they just started out with photos.
And then they add stories, as you said,
after Snapchat came out,
and it turns out people loved stories.
And then they added reels after TikTok came out,
because what do they want to do?
They don't want to lose audience.
They want to be able to capture audience,
grow audience within their silo, right?
They don't want to lose, because they have advertisers
who are paying if they can give them more impressions.
And like that, that's what it comes down to, right?
On Nostra, you don't have that same perverse
incentive structure.
And so like we're all, everyone is used to using
a bunch of different applications for different things.
This is the whole point of applications, right?
This is why you have a bunch on your phone,
because you use different apps for different things
and they do that, that one thing a lot better.
And you like it, and you know that that's where you go
for whatever that is you want to do.
And I think that that's a very powerful kind of message
to Nostra developers as well that you just gave,
is you're going to be more successful
and ultimately have more control with fewer externalities
over your development of your client,
if it is a micro app, if it is something
that is specialized in just doing one thing.
Because as you said, otherwise, yeah,
you can keep up with any changes, any new nips,
you can keep up with any maintenance that needs to be done.
But the more things you add into your app,
that just compounds.
The technical debt that you have to repay grows.
And so you're making your life hard,
you're acquiring a higher head count.
And that kind of brings me to another point,
which is if you are growing your head count
as a Nostra client, you've got to pay people.
Like yeah, there are grants around,
which is amazing through open Sats.
And I think that's fantastic that there's
Nostra development being funded through that,
among other things.
But what do you think, what are your thoughts
on just revenue models for clients?
And do you think kind of the paid client of,
okay, you pay this much for a year,
and whether it's a micro app or a super app,
and that's going to give you some extra features,
or it's going to provide some extra services,
maybe it's more data persistence
that you get for what you're posting,
maybe it's cloud storage attached to it,
whatever it might be, maybe it's a special badge,
and that's it, I don't know.
But what do you see as the most viable revenue models
for Nostra clients?
And how do you think about that
as the creator of Amethyst as well?
What are you thinking about implementing?
Cause you've got to keep the lights on too, you know?
Yeah.
So for us, and I have been open about this
for quite some time, I have thought about all these
different business models or different,
the business models we see out there,
subscriptions and rev share and so on.
To me, they all have perversive incentives.
So for instance, let's pick an app that has
a set of basic like X, has a set of basic features
that is all free, and you can subscribe
and you get premium features.
Well, when you offer something like that,
it is natural for the development team,
for the sales team, for the marketing team
to say, you know what, we are not making money
on the free stuff, we should only focus our time
and effort on the premium features.
And maybe that's the way to go,
but very clearly you see that there are two classes of users
and one's getting everything because they're paying for it
and maybe they deserve to get everything.
But the free layer is the one that is getting onboarded
and getting trained to use the app
and experimenting with it.
So it's a little bit of perverse incentives
in that sense that you're not actually there
because you're not there for yourself.
You're there, you might be the product
because they're selling you for ads
or there's something there that you're not paying for.
Which I guess is okay as a free product,
every product has a free layer like this,
but it's not really aligned with what users want.
It aligns with the premium users and what they want,
but not with the free users.
The same for relays, like if you have a free relay right now,
the relay operator is not aligned with what you want
because they need money and they need to get somebody else.
And for them it's even worse than for apps
because while I only have a development cost
and maintenance in the development kind of space,
they have operational costs.
They cannot keep servers online for free.
They have to find money somewhere.
If I go on a vacation for a month,
Amethyst will be there, right?
But they don't.
So on all these business models,
there are some incentives that I really do not like
and that includes subscription, rev share,
and Audemore, I don't know, venture-based models
that you see out there,
that especially the rev share model for me
is like it's just never gonna work.
Or it might work, but it requires so much
and it requires the level of thinking
that only VCs can provide to companies
because you have to reach scale at some point
that it just become a bank.
And with rev share, you are a bank.
I'm sorry, that's what you are.
So the app itself is less important.
It drives users, but why would you develop something
that people not, just develop the banking part, you know?
That do that really well and make sure the cost in that
is structured to be minimum for you.
So for Amethyst, what I'm trying to do,
and I don't know if this is gonna work or not,
but the early numbers do make some sense.
We are exploiting this idea of value for value
on each release, whereby on each release,
I name the developers that participated in that release,
a maker release note with everything that's going on.
And then when you open the app,
there is a little pop that says zap the devs
and that is just a zap split to all of them individually.
So the money doesn't get to me,
it goes to everybody, straight up from each one of the users.
And they can't decide to donate how much they want in there,
but there is no give and take.
There is no financial relationship.
It's not that you are paying for certain features,
no, you're not paying for anything,
you're paying for the things that you already received.
If you like it, you pay.
And right now today, we're getting about 200, 300,
some good months, $400 worth of payments.
And I think we are so small right now
that that number, if we grow, it starts to make sense.
Even at that scale of like,
if it just proportionally stays in that level,
when this is usually like,
that your top one, two percent of users
that will pay for that amount.
But if you just scale that, even if it's just 1%,
it does work, it does sustain a company
with 100 people, 100 devs,
that can be just turning features
and making sure the app is as good as it gets.
And that is probably enough for an app like Twitter.
You know, Twitter, we know today has what,
1,000 employees max, and they have to deal
with all the government stuff that they have in their books.
So I'm like, I'm not doing any of that.
I don't even have servers.
We just need developers,
we just need the maintenance of the code.
And that relationship needs to be there.
And I prefer that users pay the developers directly
because it creates an incentive for devs themselves
to participate and to ship cool new things every month.
Because of course, if they just keep maintaining the app
without adding any new feature,
no one's gonna pay for that, right?
So they have to create new things.
They have to make things better.
They have to significantly improve the app,
maybe add new features, maybe remove new features,
but either way, people will actually do that transaction
because of the release they just put out.
And that seems to be working.
It has been working for the past year or so,
in numbers that if you just extrapolate from it,
it might make sense.
We need to see how it grows, but it might make sense.
And if we can make that work,
that for me is the dream business model.
You know, you are paying for the product
people are developing for,
and if they develop more interesting features to you,
you pay more, and they know they got more.
There is no one in between.
It's not the money's coming to me first,
and then I have to redistribute them,
and then there's a decision there
that might not make everybody happy.
No, no, no.
You are sending money straight to the devs,
to everybody in the team.
That also includes some tax benefits
because there is no centralized company
to get the tax first, and then pay out the employees later.
So there are some benefits there
that because it's open source,
and because we don't have operational services,
there is literally no liability
that anyone can take from this.
So you don't actually need a company, per se,
a legal entity to protect other folks,
because we're not even controlling data
for people, for instance,
and hopefully we remain like that forever.
So that value for value model to me is,
if it works, and we think it does,
is one of the best things that could come up
out of this experiment called Amatist.
And if we can get it to work,
I do think we're gonna have something better in the end.
Of course, everybody else will have a different take on this.
I do think the specialty apps
can actually charge for the specialty they provide.
So for instance, I have a,
I pay almost $70 a year for the simplified Gmail plugin,
which just takes Gmail and change the HTML to look good.
That's the only thing it does.
And they're very straightforward,
like we're just making your thing better.
And, but we charge that amount per year.
And I'm happy to pay for it.
So that's the same thing that will happen,
I think with Nostar, which is,
you might have the Amatist out there,
the free stuff out there,
and then there is this very customized client
that just say, you know what,
we're doing everything they do, but much better.
And you were paying for the much better part,
not for the fee, the fee is already there.
You can watch it from any other place.
Hours just so happens to be so much better
than you're gonna be willing to pay $70 a year, for instance,
for just a better user interface.
And maybe that's what triggers some other folks out there
to actually develop really, really good UIs.
Where, yeah, you can always go back
and use some open source and free things,
but if you're really into this, you know where to go.
Like if you are, I don't know,
if you have a soccer team of your friends
that plays here and there every week or so,
and you need an app to manage that,
manage the space, the payments
that everybody goes to each other and so on,
maybe there's an app for that.
And that app costs, you know, $2, $3 a month
for just those features.
But they do it so well that that becomes the app to go.
And it just so happens to be decentralized,
self-custodial and private in the way we all want to see.
I love that.
And in that same vein, what's kind of your elevator pitch?
You've got a few, you know, a minute or so
with a fellow developer who's working on whatever it might
maybe, maybe they're working on another social media platform.
Maybe they're just, they're working
for some big conglomerate.
Or maybe they're just, they're doing that,
but they also do some open source development on the side,
but they haven't heard of Noster.
What's your elevator pitch to developers
for here's why you should develop on Noster?
Here's why you should at least look at it.
So for Devs is something interesting
because it probably doesn't ring a bell with users in general,
but it's essentially the fact that the database
is solved for you.
Like you don't, like because the way Devs think
is like if I'm gonna need to build a new system,
immediately in my mind, and this comes from our training
in computer science and they tell us to do that really well,
which is I need a signing page, I need username password,
I need a database where I know the order of my records
and when they come and kind of trust
that package of information.
And my goal as a developer is to keep that information
package tight and very precise to the point
that I can do something with it.
It's like if it's a mess, I can't do anything.
So most, if not all computer scientists
are trained to think of like let's organize our database.
Let's make sure this thing makes sense,
especially if you have a bigger team,
you have to define how many columns you have
in each one of your tables and so on.
And those things do have a lot of cost
and they are the most annoying thing to do in computer science.
You're looking at something like,
oh man, I didn't study seven years
to just define how many columns in the table should have.
It's like, I wanna do interfaces,
I wanna do school new things, I wanna offer new services,
but yet you are down there week after week
defining the tables first and then you have to develop
your login system and your credentialing system
and all your crypto around those two things.
So that then later you can develop
what you actually want to develop.
You know what I mean?
So it's like with Nostra in a weekend,
you say just download this library that connects
to the relay and in two hours,
you can have something displayed on your screen
with real data, with stuff that people are already using.
This is not a demo database, this is not a,
no, no, no, it's real, like it's already there.
If you decide to post something there,
it will show up to other production apps
that are available and you can do that in a few hours.
And I think that does not have any other alternative
anywhere that can do this so quickly.
You can think about blockchains as something equivalent,
like use Ethereum and just develop a token
and like it's out there, right?
But you know that developing a token
takes months on Ethereum because it's so complicated
and you need a token to do everything else.
With Nostra it's like, no, it's just like,
you wanna, I don't know, you want a new video feed,
client, if you know how to play videos on say,
on the web, on the web page, you can do it in a weekend,
in a few hours.
And that is the power of Nostra,
not only for users but for DABS as well.
You don't need to worry too much about the database,
about caching systems, at least not in the beginning.
You can get things going very quickly
and you can test ideas very quickly.
I was playing around with that idea
of the health data on Nostra just a few days ago.
And one of our meetings, one of the doctors said,
you know what, it would be nice to just have like a page
that I can fill in my prescription
and I put the NPUB of my patient and just send it
and they get a GM with my actual prescription there.
And I was like, well, that's an hour of work.
I build it in that afternoon and say,
should be there, I was like, is this what you want?
And I was like, yeah, and I was like,
how there is nothing else in computer science
that can build something that quickly
that integrates a production system that fast.
I mean, that's a compelling pitch
and I'm not even a developer.
So, I love that.
I think that is a really powerful thing
that you can be up and running without,
you know, you don't need to go and learn
a bunch of new stuff either.
We're talking about using the existing tools
in your own arsenal to be able to go out there
and make something meaningful that can attract users
and be again, and receive user data at least
right from the very beginning,
which is incredibly powerful.
Yeah.
And this is like, remember every new,
in the way computer scientists and maybe other folks,
other fields of research have the same thing is,
for every new product, we kind of know a base price.
So you want a new app for Android,
I'm gonna tell you 50K to the list.
Like this is the minimum to get a viable app
that you can actually show to people.
On the website is a little bit less,
maybe 20K, 15K and so on for a website
that you might be proud of that you can show to people.
In Nostra, two hours, three hours max,
you know, is one to two people,
maybe three, four K there in terms of assets and everything,
all the images you need to generate and so on.
It's so much better, so much faster
and you feel truly a product centered person.
All you wanna do is to develop something,
put in the market, test if they like it,
if they like it, you keep going with it,
if they don't, you shut it down
and 90% of the things you create,
they're not gonna like and the 10% that they might like,
you might, you have the decision to make
to keep moving forward or not.
And because Nostra's so quick,
it just becomes the ideal place to run all those experiments.
You know, we have, we see in Nostra all the time,
this is like, I have a new client that does XYZ
and I just did this in two weeks and so on,
it's like, yeah, that's kinda what it takes.
And hopefully that, those things become, you know,
the new platforms to develop startups on
that people can actually make a living on this,
that people can actually do something interesting
and again, just so happens to be self custodial,
private and decentralized by definition.
So people are getting things done
because they need to get things done
just in a way that we all like it to be done, you know.
I love that, you know, this, and this brings me back
because that was an excellent pitch to developers
and this brings me back to kind of users
but more specifically content creators
because I think you and I just from what you said earlier,
we both agree that like what makes people
want to be here, wherever here is, whatever, you know,
but here is in the no, in Nooster sense,
it is the creators that you have.
And again, anyone can, the beauty of like the year 2024
is literally anyone can be a creator with this.
Like you have a 4K camera, you have a microphone,
you have the ability to edit, like you,
anyone can be a creator, that's powerful.
But obviously creators that have much larger following,
if you look at somebody like Joe Rogan
going over to Spotify, there's a reason they paid him
an ungodly amount of money to do that
because he is the biggest podcaster in the world
and he will bring people, he will bring his audience
with him because there are millions of people
who will listen to every episode that comes out
and it doesn't matter where he's putting those episodes out,
they're gonna go there because they want to consume
his content.
So I'm curious, because I also agree with your point,
100% that the key value proposition pitch
to like the average content creator,
the average content creator, the average person
doesn't really care that much about the fact that,
you know, it's decentralized,
permissionless, censorship resistant.
They may care if they get de-platformed,
they may care if they get censored,
but a lot of them won't because they tow the line
and so that's not something that they really think
about, you know, yeah, it happens to other people,
but not to me.
So what is your pitch to the content creators out there
who are, maybe they haven't heard of Noster yet,
maybe they have, maybe they decided to ignore it,
but what's your pitch to them for why they should at least
try Noster?
That's a good one.
Because my head immediately went into the question of,
why are you giving Twitter your content?
Why are you giving YouTube your content?
Because that's what you're doing.
You're making all this thing and then giving up
for free to this platform.
Yeah, they are paying you,
but they are paying close to nothing.
And I was like, yeah, sure, you can get users,
you can get your name out because just so happens
that right now they have the network effects
that you need to grow, but would you do that if they didn't?
And now would you actually give them your content?
I stopped using Twitter for a while now
because it didn't really make sense.
It's like, why am I even posting on this platform?
It's very clear that they're making money on ads,
that they are making money on subscriptions,
that they now want to charge everyone to,
I just don't know, jam each other.
And I'm like, and where is my money?
And I was like, I am there providing content.
What's the deal, right?
So to me, Noster serves as this valve of like,
people can just keep into it.
For now, I don't think this is a long-term pitch
because you have to go where the audience is.
So if the audience is in a centralized platform,
you will go there, there's no question about it.
But hopefully over time, we build so many structures
and so many interesting things around Noster
where the audience starts to flip back into something
like more decentralized like Noster.
It's not gonna be overnight.
We know from the development of say, Bitcoin
and other decentralized specs that it does take time
and enough people need to be engaged
and the tooling around it needs to be good enough
to be on par with this massive corporation
that has all the cash right now.
So it's not gonna be overnight for sure.
Like I'm not here, I'm not saying,
next year we're gonna have the best streaming platforms
on Noster, no, we're not gonna have.
But we're gonna be better than today.
And hopefully because that content,
we will stay there for the future.
We can start building a library of content
and some level of real-time information
that might start to make sense for everybody to migrate.
And Noster is one of those things
where every little thing helps.
So on the idea of the health data that I was just discussing,
if I can get my medical records on Noster,
well, now I already have a key.
Now I already have an NPUB.
Why won't I just use another Twitter client
because I can just reuse the same login I have.
I don't need to reinsert everything back again, right?
So all those little things, they start to stack on each other.
There's something very few people know
but it is a calendar NIP on Noster
that just replaces Google Calendar or your Calendar of Preference.
There are not many clients out there
that supported really well yet.
But that's another thing.
It's like, if I can just shift this, my daily job
and just start communicating over Noster
and then I add an appointment in my calendar on Noster
and then I have an I call for calendar
that people can book appointments with me
and that interface as well.
And by the way, this is all free
and they can choose whatever interface they want
because I don't really care, it's their choice.
This just stacks one on top of the other.
And with all of this, if we can get or start to get
some content out of these other platforms,
then things starts to scale up.
I don't ever think we're gonna need to get to a place
where we're gonna pay Joe Rogan $100 million
to come to Noster, imagine that, right?
Because we're not gonna need Joe.
And let me rephrase that.
If we are right that this platform about,
a platform about decentralization,
self-co-studio of keys and privacy,
if we are right that this thing is what should drive the world,
they are gonna come to us.
The only variable on all of this is,
can we make better apps, better structures,
better tooling for the folks participating on it,
then large corporations out there?
And I think we can.
We all have seen how say Linux have progressed
from a small open source operating system
and now it's on every Android phone.
So it's Apple uses, it's a free BST based system.
So it's kinda similar but not really.
But you can see how open source in the long run wins.
But it has won in the past in ways that
this companies could hold our information
and our identity with them.
We just need this little switch that like,
allows us to keep those things with ourselves
while these bigger corporations
still make the money they need to make, right?
Like we're not saying that they should stop
like Apple will not stop to exist, right?
Like Google will still be there.
But Google can index Noster posts on their search, right?
They could use Noster information in their new AI things.
They can do a Noster client that use those things.
That's not gonna be more or less,
the fact that they're trying to integrate with Noster
is not gonna be more or less money to them
because of everything else they already have.
But it does, it will mean that we are gradually transitioning
over to a platform that is just a little bit more
decentralized than what we have had in the past.
I think that's such an interesting idea too.
And I think, for example, Twitter,
I would not be surprised if in a number of years,
Twitter starts surfacing, or X, excuse me,
starts old habits die hard.
As to start surfacing.
I had like this pitch with Jack Dorsey for quite a while now.
I think Jack needs to buy the Twitter brand out of X
and re-release Twitter as a new Noster client
because the brand is so powerful.
Everybody keeps using the term tweet
and no one is Xing around.
They are tweeting, even though the thing is called X now
for like what, six months.
And I'm like, that is power.
If we can get that brand and just ship it again
as a Noster product, the brand in itself
might be worth the whole thing.
It's just, I don't know.
So you just used the term tweet, I was like, yeah,
that's why we need to stay.
Yeah, so Jack, if you end up listening to this,
you've now heard the pitch, get that brand.
Buy the brand, Jack.
Uncage the blue bird again, let it fly.
Set it alongside the purple bird, it's beautiful.
That would really be something.
I would love to see some retro Twitter UI as well.
That would be kind of cool.
Like don't go to the more modern versions of the Twitter UI.
Go back to some of the older versions.
Give people a little taste of nostalgia
in there along the way.
I don't know, now I'm just spitballing.
But the other thing I wanted to point out just,
because you did mention, yeah, the network is very early.
The network is very young.
The network is still relatively small.
It is growing, yes, it's growing steadily,
but it's growing slowly.
That's not a bad thing either.
We're still in the early adoption phase.
But the beauty of that that I see for content creators,
and this is something that Jeff Booth has done
a really good job of explaining actually
from his early days using Twitter,
is that when you are early to, in this case,
in Twitter's case, a platform,
but in this case, a protocol,
when you are early to a protocol
that is being used for social media,
of course, there are a lot more applications of Noster,
but right now, like we're talking about social media
use cases, right?
When you're early to a social media protocol,
not only do you get the general benefits
of being an early adopter,
being able to become a power user of this protocol
before the masses come in,
but as the network grows,
as that network effect takes hold,
you benefit from that network effect.
As the network grows, your following grows in proportion,
perhaps not direct proportion, but close
to that network growth.
That is incredibly powerful,
and that is only possible to the extent
that you have the ability,
like you're not just benefiting from one,
one applications growth, like on Twitter.
You're benefiting from the entire ecosystem.
Everything that is being built on Noster
is in service of the user.
You are the user, and if you are a user
who is also creating,
all the tools that are being built,
those are in service of you, right?
And as the number of users on that network grows,
you then are able to capture that network growth
that is happening organically around you,
and that benefits you.
And I think that's incredibly compelling.
Again, put the censorship resistance,
put the permissionless, decentralized,
put all of that aside.
We think that's great.
Sure, most people, they don't give a fuck,
but you are able to ultimately grow a following
that you can take with you anywhere,
and all you need is your end pub,
and your following will grow in proportion
to the growth of the network, of the protocol growth.
You are benefiting from the network effect
of a decentralized open source protocol
that can't be shut down.
That is incredibly powerful.
So even if you don't care about censorship resistance
and permissionless and all of that,
but you might care about growing your following,
and that's something you can do like none other on Noster
because of the structure of an open protocol.
And I think that's incredibly powerful,
and it should be incredibly compelling
to content creators out there.
And again, anyone can be a content creator.
You're a content creator if you're just publishing
your thoughts, if you're saying,
here's my breakfast, hashtag foodster,
you're a content creator too.
That's the beauty of having all of this technology
in our pockets.
And I don't know, I think that's a beautiful thing,
and it's a powerful thing.
And I think that is what is ultimately,
the more people that pick up on that as content creators,
I think it's a well-kept secret right now,
but not for long.
People are gonna realize that.
I think that's a good thing.
Yeah, and in this space, you're not gonna have a YouTube
telling that other feeds that you might be comp...
Other authors that you might be competing with
get the premium spot on people's feet instead of you.
There's no centralized determination
of who gets to see you what.
Every user, they might use an algorithm for this,
they might not, their client might offer,
it might not.
It's just so diverse that you can't really be based on,
yeah, I need to just please YouTube to get it
to the top spot so that I can actually be the person
I'm trying to be as a creator.
The fact that the data is virtually open,
that anyone can access, that is not centralized
behind the doors of, say, Google,
it means that this ecosystem of tools has to develop
without considering ownership of the data in mind,
meaning anything that they do to make sure
there is a differentiator from them
to any other application has to be based
on anything but the data,
which is kind of the opposite
that has been happening for the past 20 years.
Facebook, Google, Instagram, what do they have?
They have data and it just so happens
to also do a little bit of UI work here and there.
That is minimally acceptable for us
to give them the data they want.
Now in Nostra, that is not there.
You can't own people's data, it doesn't work like that.
Even if you work a relay operator,
people can just move to another relay.
It doesn't really work in the way people
usually think in the traditional sense.
So in a sense, say capitalism,
we'll push this apps and this clients forward
on the way we want by competing with each other
on the best features, the best UI, the best experience,
instead of what we don't want,
just isolating themselves and the data they capture
out from everybody else.
That will never happen in Nostra.
So you go into this ecosystem, if you believe in this
and if you're a creator that minimally understands
how this works, this makes a lot of sense.
The only barrier that you will not join Nostra right now
is because the other platforms have more users
and they can use that as leverage today.
But that's not gonna be the case in many years.
So it's early, we are still developing many things
that we have today, but those who are starting
to get their followers already on Nostra
are taking a significant advantage over everybody else
because they're gonna grow faster.
And we all know how network effects happen.
It just so happens that on Nostra,
the network effects themselves are owned by the creator.
They are not owned by YouTube and Google and so on.
In the sense that the creator controls
what to do with the followers.
The creator controls where to take them
into multiple relays, multiple different communities,
multiple different apps that do different things,
do have slightly different communities
that can serve different people
within their user base, slightly better.
They can build cities inside Nostra.
They can build just YouTube streams inside Nostra.
They can do educational content
and they can have another community
for more entertainment content.
So it's a thing that if creators usually understand
this really well when they start to grow,
if you do have your power over your network effects,
you can, you are the voice that matters.
You are the voice that gets to decide a few things,
just because you are bigger than everybody else.
And hopefully the initial creators we get
are also so aligned with this idea
of decentralization privacy and self-cosodial systems
that they defend those three flags
with all of their users.
And we just get to see a massive grow
of that user base over time.
Amen.
And I may not be the scale of Joe Rogan,
but from this humble creator,
I can say that I do defend those principles
because that does genuinely matter to me,
even if it may not matter to the multitude
of other creators who will come on here.
But I've found it as a content creator
and the actual authentic engagement that you get
on Noster is so much better
than what you get on any centralized platform.
Like people actually want to have a conversation.
Is what I, that's the biggest thing you notice.
People actually want to engage.
It's not just posting a comment under some big account
because you want to suck some of their energy out,
get some of their followers to like your comment,
maybe follow you, subscribe to you, whatever.
No, no, no, it's not that.
It's that people have genuine questions.
They have genuine feedback.
I've had people who were nice enough to DM me
for some of my earlier episodes
and they're like, hey man, I just want to let you know,
I love the episode, but your audio levels
are really screwed up.
Like you should take a look.
It's like, oh, thanks.
I really, I don't know what I'm doing,
so I need to look into that more because I've not,
but it's that kind of stuff.
And it's also, there is a genuine value for value model
while I think it's still very much in its early stages.
And it's amazing that you're doing that with Amethyst
from the development side.
And I also think that it's something for content creators.
It actually encourages you to be your most authentic self
because people don't want to zap in authentic bullshit.
They want to zap things that are from the heart,
that are said from a place of truth, not a place of lies.
They want to zap things that make them feel good.
You know, if you implemented zaps tomorrow on Twitter,
on X, excuse me, I'll never get Twitter out of my head.
If you implemented zaps tomorrow.
By the brand Jack.
By the brand.
But if you did this tomorrow on X,
it would be so interesting to see all of the rage bait,
all of the doom porn, all of the just negativity
that gets so much engagement on there.
I don't think it would get a lot of zaps.
I don't think it would get a lot of actual real world
monetary value sent to it.
That kind of engagement bait only works
because it's an advertising first model.
And if you take that away and you make it to a value for value model,
value becomes that algorithm.
Value becomes the signal.
And people are, they don't really want to send you money
when you made them feel like shit.
Turns out who knew, you know, shocking.
Yeah.
But so I think that's a beautiful thing.
And I want to be by the way, if you take an answer today
and you do a trending topic by, sorry,
trending topics by reactions,
the likes, the all the emojis and so on that people are sending to each other
and a training topics by zaps.
You will see that they rarely match.
So even, even in a place where we don't have as much say,
I don't even negativity, I would call it,
you already see a big difference between the two.
That are people that have large networks that can get a large amount of reactions
and replies and so on to themselves, but only because they are large.
And then you have all this, I would call them mid level creators
that are getting all those apps because they are actually saying things
that people felt comfortable paying for.
That is not only about the size of their follow-up base,
but it's about what they actually say and what they actually put down
on the text that they are writing.
So you see that even today with Noster already,
you know, forget about all the negativity stuff.
It's like, Noster is beautiful because you can explore all these models,
you know, and you can say, you know what, what matters to me is this zap amount.
And I'm going to go after that because I think that's my biggest,
well, that's the way I'm going to make money,
but also that's how I perceive that my users are seeing value on this.
Or you can say, you know what, I'm going to go after reactions
because I'm a comedy person and I want to get laughs out.
I don't really care about the money, you know, I care about, you know, the things.
So those are two different models.
Today, if you turn up YouTube or Twitter, you can't decide if you want I draw.
Like, no, you have to follow whatever they say.
In Noster, you can just be yourself and play with the type of feature
that kind of means the most to you.
That's really beautifully said.
And by the way, I'm going to make a challenge to you, which I just had an idea.
Okay.
I think this conversation must be on ZappStream.
Okay.
And you can play it live and then later release the video with all the edits.
Okay.
So you can get out the valley for valley services going on,
say on the ZappStream and then you can get the more refined version of the content later on.
So you know what I'm saying.
You can cut this out if you want later, but it's up to you.
No, no, no, I leave it from start to finish.
I leave it all in because I don't want to ever be seen as somehow censoring my own content, you know.
But what I do right now, my workflow is basically I upload the full length long form video.
So, you know, an hour and a half, two hours, whatever it ends up being.
I upload those to satellite.earth slash CDN.
And I pay for that hosting in Bitcoin, which is great.
And I, you know, you pay a rate based on how, how much data you need stored there.
I then post them through highlighter.
So I go to, you know, highlighter.com.
I, I posted the, they published a really nice job with that because, you know, it lets me upload thumbnails and tags and all that.
As soon as I post from there, it's immediately available on flare.pub, which I'm not sure how much folks are using as much anymore, but it's actually a really nice interface.
For viewing content, I'm very impressed with that.
And then I'll post short, I'll post links.
Do you place the YouTube link on flare or the actual file like an mp4 file?
When, when, as, because it's hosted on satellite.earth, as soon as I publish that through highlighter, it's automatically on flare.
And that's the beauty of Noster.
I don't have to do anything else.
It's just there.
Like it's, it's good to go.
It's up there on flare and any other Noster clients in the future that are going to implement that are also, you know, going to be pulling those events.
So that's what I love about it is that it's, it's so darn easy for me from a workflow perspective.
So when I do that on Noster, again, I'm uploading the full video.
I'm posting it all the highlighter.
It's going to flare.
It's going to wherever else there are probably some other clients that are pulling it up in that same way for long form videos that I'm not even aware of.
When I still post the videos on YouTube and I put them on rumble as well.
And that's just a pain in the ass because I need to individually upload them and post them to both.
So they're, they're hosted through both of those.
And that's, that's just difficult.
I also, I love what fountain has been doing.
The fact that fountain has basically become a Noster client is really cool.
And they pull in not just now they've made it to, they pull in not just fountain episodes that will be surfaced in fountain, but they've made it so that any sort of audio media that is posted any.
So it's, you post a Spotify link on Noster and you post an Apple podcast link on Noster.
It pulls all of that into fountain, which I think is great because they're looking at it again as not just a media player for podcasts, but as a content discovery tool.
Enabled by Noster.
And I think that's really powerful.
So I have not used Zapstream yet because I don't do live stuff, but I know I can upload it there.
I think and still do like a replay of it.
Well, the idea is to use the live chat.
Yeah.
I get you some, some live interaction and then maybe some, because they do have a very nice value for value kind of proposition during the live chat.
So we could be talking to, you know, the folks that are listening to us right now, if this was live, and they could send questions and so on.
And you can present them.
There are many things that can happen because it's live, which might trigger how you're going to actually resolve your audio and your studio setup.
But if you can do it, I think it's going to be great.
And the thing that I'm going to promise you to do is the Flare.Pub videos, they are supposed to show on Amity's real already today.
Not sure why they're not showing yours, but I will check why.
Because if there is a file there and not just a link to YouTube, because we don't show YouTube, then it should show even today.
So it becomes, even if it's an hour long episode, it will show up there for people to watch.
Okay, that's awesome.
You know, I've been debating having like a Noster interoperability panel on this show one of these times and get like you and Pablo and, you know, maybe Milian and Will together and have a little power.
That one we would have to do on ZaptopStream, maybe also host it on as a Noster Nest. We go the whole, run the gamut there.
But no, that's, see, that's the beautiful thing.
Like if I can publish again just via highlighter, because I like the highlighter interface, make it very easy.
I can upload my thumbnail and whatnot too.
And then it's available in multiple locations.
I don't need to go and post it where the users are, the users are wherever they want to be, they'll find it.
It'll come to them. And that's such a powerful thing about Noster.
And the beauty is like you were using highlighter, which is one of the creator tools.
Highlighter is more of a creator tool than a viewer tool, you know.
Yeah.
And if they start providing additional features that can increase your reach or can just make your videos better automatically somehow.
You know, those things are worth paying for.
And if you are out there and you're thinking about developing a solution like that, there's people waiting.
There's people like you, like lots of other streamers that are just waiting to get into the game.
They just want to have the same quality they had in other platforms back on Noster.
And if you can provide that in a nice enough user interface for now, just to start,
I do think a lot of new content will just start to show up.
Content that is, you know, native to Noster, as opposed to just a link to YouTube, a link to this, no, no, no.
Let's make sure, you know, we own everything and everything is signed and verified when you can actually control what you do.
Amen. And that's the power of it, right?
It's that interoperability, but it's also the verifiability to know that, yeah, this really came from that content creator like this.
I know they're in pub, I, you know, it's a beautiful thing.
And I want to be conscious of your scarce time here because I know we've run for a while.
Is there anything you wanted to dig into today that we didn't get a chance to?
Have we done, we didn't talk about really algorithms or discoverability.
We may have to save that for another conversation, but is there anything else that you wanted to get into that we didn't get a chance to?
Or anything you want to talk about with Amethyst specifically or Noster generally?
So the latest feature for Amethyst that we have been very excited about is this integration with the Tor network.
So the next version of Amethyst will ship with a Tor browser baked into the device, the app.
So that you don't need to use any external VPN or any other service to connect into Tor.
And the way we are doing this, and we realized only later that this could be beneficial for users,
is not that, you know, the app will work only inside Tor, which, you know, loading images and loading videos in Tor is a little bit more difficult because it takes longer and so on.
But it will be used side by side with the clear net connection.
So for most of the, say, the relay communication that Amethyst needs to do, that new version now will hide your IP from all the relays out there.
So it's one last tracking point that people can use to link, you know, interest with your pub keys and then sell what you're interested on to some other folks.
So they can do less. It's not perfect by any means.
But we are getting to this point, and I think Tor is getting there, some other privacy networks are getting there as well, that what they can provide is good enough that we can ship an app with enabled defaults that already use them.
So Amethyst, for instance, will ship with Tor enabled for all users.
And if they want, they can disable it, but by default it will be enabled.
And because it will be enabled, I think now we can have, we can start to have a different conversation in Nostar, which is, does it really make sense to have relays on a clear net?
Or why don't we just move them all into Tor? And not sure if you know how Tor works, but Tor is this thing where if it needs to leave the network, the Tor network, and into the real web, to access a website in outside Tor, that site will know the exit point on Tor.
So the exit computer will be known to everybody.
If there really is providing services inside of Tor directly, there is no way to figure out what's what.
So it becomes much better from a privacy standpoint to just serve content strictly inside the Tor network.
And for users and apps that can provide that connection as a default, which Amethyst will start doing and hopefully other people will follow, now everything is more private, more close to its ecosystem, which is the Tor Onion framework design that they have.
And it's just, you know, that slightly better of an approach than before.
And hopefully this becomes a standard that other apps will follow.
I haven't seen many apps shipping Tor enabled content by default.
But now it is really possible.
And Amethyst will start doing it, hopefully other Nostar apps will start doing it.
So hopefully we have some release now moving their content to be inside of the Tor network so there is no exit node, no one can track them, no one can see that this thing is coming out of the Tor network.
And we can just enhance the entire network by just by this little decision to make it a default for, by default it is enabled.
So if you have a Tor relay, you will use the regular clear net relay and the Tor relay at the same time.
You don't need to choose where you want.
You know how in browser you can choose like go to the incognito mode and, you know, some sites that you remember you can turn that on and so on.
With Amethyst there's just the default.
And the app will kind of choose which way to go based on your settings and based on the level of trust you place on the relay.
So if you say, you know what, relays XYZ are my relays, I know them very well, they are in my list.
Those are trusted, you don't need to use Tor for those things, so it's a little bit faster to get that information.
But for everything else, if you need to connect to anything else, it's still Tor.
And I don't want to know like what's happening behind scenes, I just want to know it's private and no one can trace me because of that access.
I love that because it's making privacy, it's privacy by default, it's convenient privacy for the user who may not otherwise take the necessary steps to guard their own privacy.
But this is something that you're building in at the application layer so that they have, you know, the option is not only there, but it's on by default.
It's saying, yeah, we're going to make this more private for you.
And you don't have to worry about that, you don't have to be technically inclined to figure this out.
We're just going to do it.
And I think I hope that more clients move toward that kind of model because again, I think anytime you can make privacy easier for the user or on by default, that's ultimately better for that individual user, but also for the entire network.
And to the point of the onboarding procedures we mentioned before, we're not going to cite the Tor name anywhere, meaning in the settings, sure.
But like if you're creating an account, there's not going to be a mention to Tor.
We're not going to mention that this is a private client.
This is just a regular client that just so happens to take privacy into consideration and ships it by default.
So that is what I think like that type of change to me is what regular users really want.
I don't want to choose to have the private app, whatever that is.
I want an app.
And if it is private, it's better.
So like just do the thing that you're supposed to do, be private, be as private and as decentralized as our self-co-storial as you can, but give me the features I want because I just care about the features.
So the funny thing is like on our new user creation screens, we really are not going to talk about privacy at all because that's not the point.
You're not there to discuss how private your posts are. You're there to post.
They just so happen to be private.
So hopefully that gets ingrained into other apps and other people start seeing that framework as viable.
Again, this is just because the Tor folks did release a really good library a few months or maybe a year ago that truly allows us to do that now with any application in your phone.
You can just ship with Tor Enable and on by default.
So if you care about these types of things, you can just give that to your user almost free of any friction that you might otherwise have in the past from this idea of I have to choose the incognito mode and like, no, just do it by default.
And you know, people will use it and there might be some issues in the beginning, but we're going to figure those things out.
And if we can get it going in a way that, like I said, Tor is a little bit slower.
So if it doesn't get too slow that it becomes perceivable to a user, then I think it's a win for everybody.
I think that's awesome. Again, the fact that it's privacy by default is really powerful.
And even though users may not most a lot of them may not care about that as much. There may come a day when they do care about that very much.
And to find out that that's already on for them, but that's already like nobody's going to be mad that a developer made the decision to make things more private.
You're going to be mad if you find out the developer was actually making things specifically not private and selling your data and doing whatever else.
Nobody's mad when they find out that somebody is making an experience more private for them. So I think that's beautiful.
And again, I want to thank you because this was really enjoyable. My wheels are turning. You've got me now encouraged also do a ZappStream one of these times,
even though I'm not a big live show guy, I may just have to do it. But where do you want to send people?
They should search Amethyst. If they're using Android, go to search Amethyst in the Play Store. Anywhere I'll include your NPUB in the show notes.
Anywhere else you want to send people?
No, it's just amethyst.social. If you want to try NostraApps.com has the entire directory made by Karnish, I believe, that lists all the apps and all different things you can try out with Nostra.
Most of them that are on that list are really good, really refined, are working really well. So you're not going for first level, first version kind of designs.
Things that are already up and going, like we were discussing, we have streams in Nostra, we have videos in Nostra, we have so many different things now in Nostra.
And they're ready to be used. This is not version 1.0. They're ready to go.
So go search for it and if you have any questions, use the network to ask questions, because we're all there and we can see you.
Amen. Don't be a stranger. Use that introductions hashtag, say hello when you come and join Nostra.
And I think once people start using Nostra, they realize that something feels a little bit different. They can't quite put their finger on it, but it feels different.
It feels better. It feels like a change and a positive one. And I think, again, to one of your earlier points, we win by providing a better experience.
And I think already we're getting to that point. It's been incredible to see the development in just a couple of short years.
It's going to be insane to look back five years from now and see where we're at. But we got a little ways to go until then, but I just want to thank you for building open source solutions.
And yeah, we'll go out there now and zap some notes, send some notes, make some memes, have a good time and I'll see you out there on the relays.
Yeah, let's have some fun.
Or don't Bitcoin doesn't care, but I always appreciate it.
You can find me on Nostra by going to primal.net slash Walker.
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